“Memories of dreary Sunday school classes come flooding back courtesy of The Nativity Story,” Variety‘s Todd McCarthy wrote a couple of days ago. “Earnestly Hallmark-worthy to a fault, this stodgy addition to the cinematic religious-revival gravy train offers only a bit of Year One location realism to distinguish it from films of its kind made in the ’50s and early ’60s, though at least then it might have had the advantage of a score by the likes of Miklos Rozsa, Franz Waxman or Alfred Newman. Admirers of [director] Catherine Hardwicke will be particularly surprised that the director of Thirteen and Lords of Dogtown could make something this conventional and unspontaneous.”
